It was, to paraphrase the great Eric Morecambe, a conversation containing all the right notes, if not necessarily in the right order – but I learned enough to change my mind about two long-held opinions
I had an appointment with a man from the charity ADHD UK. We arranged to meet at a pub next to a station at half past two, acknowledging that in our worlds this meant we would be there nearer three. I resolved, for the thousandth time in my life, to be there bang on time. I boarded a train that would arrive at said station at 14.24. I was going to be on time, which was an unfamiliar feeling, somewhere between exhilarating and unsettling. Then, in a classic ADHD passage of play, it all went a bit wrong. I got so absorbed in Philip Short’s biography of Putin – if Vladimir doesn’t have ADHD, I’m an oligarch – that I overshot my stop. The train back from the next station was delayed, obviously, so I was well late. Standard. I had reverted to my mean. It was nearly 3pm when I met my man, one Henry Shelford.
This meeting turned out to be the second exhilarating yet unsettling experience of the day. It was like meeting myself. Ideas, thoughts and half-thoughts tumbled out in both directions. A point would be made that would spark a response that would in itself remind one of us of another point we wanted to make which we’d better make straight away lest we forget it but when the time came to get back to the original point we’d have forgotten what it was so we would start making another different point before the other one interrupted to go off on various tangents. In this way, the baton in this zigzagging ADHD relay race would pass from one interlocutor to the other. All in all, paraphrasing the great Eric Morecambe, it was a conversation containing all the right notes, if not necessarily in the right order.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
